


Found Within the Light

by ryssabeth



Series: Lost and Found [6]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Amnesia, M/M, Memory Loss, canon!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 12:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryssabeth/pseuds/ryssabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a shot in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Found Within the Light

Grantaire’s fingers twitch against the stone floor of the Pontmercy house, his eyes moving quickly beneath his eyelids. Sweat as started to stick his shirt to his collarbone and the crook of his elbow. And it is only with practiced patience than Enjolras can repeat, for the third time that, “Joly, this  _isn’t_  tuberculosis.”

The skeptical look Enjolras receives in return doesn’t amuse him.

(Blood has started leaking from Grantaire’s left ear.)

And so he leans across the man that might become a corpse, bringing his face close to Joly’s, and he says, “fix him, or I _swear_  I will bring a pox upon your house.”

(On any other occasion, this would be funny, and slightly cruel. But now, it is desperation, and Joly’s eyes harden.)

“I don’t appreciate being threatened,” he murmurs,  rocking back on his heels, taking Grantaire’s slackened jaw in his hands, tilting his head left and right. “I’m not even sure what I’m  _fixing_.”

But he stops complaining about tuberculosis.

The others—Enjolras included—sit back, and they watch.

And they wait.

-

The world is white and empty. And if Grantaire is being honest—which he does his best to be—this place could use a paint, maybe mute down the lighting. And, perhaps, increase the population. He’s never been in a place alone before—not an environment this expansive, at any rate.

“We can’t seem to stop running into each other,” a woman says. And Grantaire turns around, finding the slim woman with close-cropped hair standing at his back, hands folded primly in front of her. “Hello again, Grantaire.”

“I never—I’ve seen you,” he says quietly, and he thinks that somewhere he can hear voices. But it’s just them, enveloped by the white. “Before. Where have I seen you?”

“You gave something to me last time we met,” she smiles, and the age on her face falls away when she does. “Something very precious. But this visit isn’t quite the same.” The smile disappears and she comes to stand before him, standing an inch or two shorter than himself. “Today, I’m here to call you home.”

Grantaire laughs, taking a step backward, away from her and the hands he has no  _memory_  of—but his body reacts with tension. “I have a home—down the road from the Musain, though on occasion I stay at my sister’s—“

“That’s not what I mean,” she murmurs. “I am here to give you the option—an option you have been drinking yourself to for quite some time. I’m here to lead you to salvation.”

He snorts. And he steps further back.

The woman doesn’t follow him.

“I don’t need salvation. I’d really rather just—“

She blinks at him, regarding him with a smile that belongs more on the lips of the famous Mona Lisa rather than hers. “You’d rather  _what_ , Grantaire? What is on this mortal plane that keeps you from coming with me? Chains will never bind you there. No vices, no hurt. Come with me, Grantaire.”

( _Riddles_ , he thinks.  _I hate riddles_.)

“I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t—“ He blinks and the white flashes against the insides of his eyelids. “I don’t know.”

“Then come with me.” She holds out her hands, both of them, palms heavenward. And there are pieces of Grantaire—broken pieces, with jagged edges, serrated and trembling—that want to go with her. The woman whose name he doesn’t know, the woman who he’s seen but can’t remember where.

But the rest of him?

The rest of him wants to stay right here.

(And— _ah_ —there are the voices, the ones that had been hovering at the edge of the white— _“I can’t get a read on his pulse very well, it’s racing” “what’s wrong with him” “I don’t know” “Grantaire you bastard if you don’t wake up and tell me—if you’re not here to explain why we’re still alive I’ll—“_ )

“No,” he says, again, his fingers curling around a bottle he doesn’t have. “No, I want to stay here.”

The woman lowers her hands, incrementally, before crossing them over her chest. A smile sitting comfortably on her lips. (Like it belongs there—he hopes she smiled a lot, before she became this sort of emissary.) “Why?”

“I’m not—there’s something. I’m not sure.” Grantaire rolls back his shoulders, can taste blood on his tongue. He thinks he feels a headache, getting ready to crash upon him with the weight of a sea. “But I can figure it out.”

( _“Grantaire—“_ )

“Are you certain?”

He pictures a café, with schoolboys ready to die for a revolution. It hurts to think of them.

( _“—you bastard—“_ )

“Will you let me?” He looks around the white, the blinding scenery that isn’t scenery at all. “Figure it out?”

“I could hardly stop you from doing anything.” Her smile is a secret smile, a mask of something that he doesn’t understand. (But there has been a lot of that, recently.)

( _“—I need you to get up—“_ )

“Then I’ll need you to excuse me, mademoiselle.”

-

Grantaire’s eyes open and the world is blinding.

But he breathes.


End file.
